if you're frustrated trying to navigate sam.gov you're not alone I'm going to show you how to find Government Contracting opportunities faster and smarter than your competition mastering sam.gov is one of the most essential things that you will need to do in order to win contracts you're going to want to stick around till the end because I'm going to show you a little known feature that almost everyone I talk to gets wrong misses when they're using sam.gov this is sam.gov It's the system for award management now this is a Government website and it's where most not all of the opportunities that the government puts out for Contracting with businesses of all sizes are going to be found now this is also where you would register your business in order to sell to the government now most people that are using sam.gov are not using it effectively or efficiently and if that's you it's not your fault there's no training on this right so I'm going to show you how to efficiently find opportunities in leads in fact we did a poll uh within our gov close Community we asked them hey what problems are you encountering what do you want to see us cover and they like hey finding opportunities that actually make sense that we can close is one of the biggest things that or biggest problems that we need solved we' like somebody to walk us through that so we are going to hit that in this episode if you're a company that is planning on selling to the government first thing you got to do is register your business and if you haven't done that you can pause this video I have other videos on how to register for sam.gov a very quick recap we have a more in-depth uh video out there is you're going to go right here where it says register your entity or get a unique entity ID you can hit get started I'll show you what that looks like and I would say one of the things that you want to do here when you're go to registry one of the things you want to do when you're registering your business is get this entity registration checklist I'm not going to walk through it now but this is going to tell you about all the documents all the information you're going to need when you register in sam.gov here's a quick tip and that tip is do not pay somebody to register your business in sam.gov you do not need to pay somebody to do this it's self-explanatory once you have the right information you can follow the checklist register your business and it takes a couple weeks to get the codes and to be officially registered but this is not rocket science trust me if you can't figure out how to register your business in sam.gov you have no business selling to the government because it's going to get a lot more complicated than this and I have some thoughts on who actually should be trying to sell to the government it's much easier to sell to other businesses than it is to sell to the US government the US government is the hardest to sell to the reason we do it is because there are large contracts and if you do it right Government Contracting Revenue can build build a big business it could take you 6 to 18 months to win a government contract that's if you're doing everything right and you have past performance and you can prove to the government that you have been doing this as a business and you deliver results so if you think you're going to start a business that sells to the government and that's the easy Road you are in for a difficult learning experience all right so assuming that you're already registered to sell to the government now we want to see how we can search for opportunities on sam.gov how do we do this like a pro and how do we not waste time I'm also going to show you some quick tips on how we can save searches a lot of people don't know how to do that on Sam so there's a lot we can do here without having to pay for an additional tool you have to learn how to do this because even if you have an additional tool it's critical trust me it's critical I've made these mistakes you have to verify anything in another government contract application where an application that's going to help you find opportuni some of the ones I've used in the past Goin IQ is on the high end it's expensive it's good but it's expensive wait till you have money Revenue coming in from this uh to invest in something like that gov tribe is a little cheaper there's other platforms as well that can make finding opportunities a little bit easier but no matter where I find that opportunity I always go back to the source of that opportunity and 99 times out of 100 it's going to be sam.gov this is where the updates are coming a lot of those third party applications that are they're linking to sam.gov to get the opportunities and information so we want to make sure you have the current information whenever we are engaging with the government on an opportunity by the way I'm a former government Acquisitions officer my name is Rick Howard managed $82 billion in contracts for the Department of Defense and now I run go close as you probably know so let's talk about search okay this is what everyone was asking for so we're in sam.gov now there's a few ways to search first I'm going to show show you what most people are looking for out the gate because most people want the quick win okay and although there's nothing wrong with a quick win for the most part government contracts don't work like that this is a long game so I'm looking for opportunities I've got any words oh I can so I can search by words here right but what I really want to do is I want to expand this and I'm going to click on contract opportunities so again select all select domain all domain I'm going to open it up then I'm going to hit contract opportunities okay now what most people are looking for are request for proposals or request for quotes I do that by going down here notice type and so let's see here and the way they're going to find that is they're going to look for solicitation so when you when I say request for proposal or a request for quote that's an official solicitation from the US government I'm going to click on solicitation a solicitation is an official announcement that the government has funding and a requirement and they are requesting from a company like you to send in a proposal or a quote to fulfill or to bid on the service product technology that the government wants to buy and the two most common forms of a solicitation are request for proposal or a request for qu so when we click on solicitation that's what we're getting we are now in the phase of Acquisitions where the government is asking for you to bid on something and I want to make something very clear this is at the end of what you should be doing if you want to sell to the government a lot of companies start here so this is the biggest tip that you're going to get in this video is you do not ever start at the I shouldn't say ever do not start at the request for proposal request for quote if you're clicking on that solicitation there is months of work that goes in before the solicitation comes out on the part of the company of you so there's a lot of things that you can do before this solicitation comes out and you should be doing if you really want to win consistently these contracts all right let's get back into it all right so we just clicked on what I told you not to click on which is a solicitation right um look there are times where there's going to be something something that comes out and you had no prior notice of it and it's just perfect for you so I'm not telling you not to go after those but that's that should be the smallest percentage of opportunities that you're going after now when I look at these by the way right now it's the beginning of February in 2025 and so it's telling me that these offers are due like for instance this one's due March 6 2025 it takes a while to write a proposal I know there's a lot of AI tools out there that can assist I'm all about making things a little bit easier but I'm telling you if you let me pause a significant amount of work goes into a proposal that is going to win a contract and the program managers which is what I was who is in charge of the government requirement and the funding and deciding how they are going to fulfill those things meaning they're going to hire a company to do something they are not stupid and the Contracting officers who legally obligate funds for the government they're not dumb like know if an AI tool wrote a proposal or if you wrote it there's a lot of nuance to this so I want you just to be very clear I want to tell you where to put your time in right we're going to put time into writing a proposal we're going to put a significant amount of time in preparing finding opportunities before this solicitation comes out so before this whatever this is this receiver before this comes out like I should have been working on this for six months I should have known this came out as a sales executive or a company working with the agent see that put it out giving them suggestions that could go in the solicitation that's the market research phase very important it is a legal phase of government Acquisitions remember the government does not buy the same way anybody else does there's thousands of pages of policy and regulation that dictate how the government buys things and right now when the solicitation comes out a ton has come out before this so look just going through this I'm showing you this to see what it looks like you're going to have the date the offers due so with a solicitation you're not submitting a proposal after the solicitation ends unless for instance the government asks you to that's a separate that's definitely a separate YouTube video but these are very strict you submit anything late and the government can basically reject your offer immediately okay so that's great we found a bunch of solicitations that probably have nothing to do with what we're actually selling how do we actually pinpoint the exact solicitations that are coming out that we potentially would engage on let's take a look at that all right so I typically do a couple of things see the first thing is I don't want to see any nonsense meaning if I keep scrolling through here I'm going to see a bunch of opportunities that have already come past du right so past du opportunities mean nothing to me so what I will do is I'll put some dates on there so I'll say response offers is due in the next three months and now there's two ways I can search through this just more than that but there's a couple ways I can search through this to make sure that I'm seeing things that apply to me so I am going to click on product or service information now North America North American industry classification code product service code the way I want you to think about these if you're not familiar NAIC codes are broad they usually cover entire Industries or segments of Industries such as accounting or IT services product service codes are more specific so instead of accounting we might see something like bookkeeping right which is a service that a accountant would provide now these codes are not like for instance if I clicked on an accounting nakes code I can tell you that there's going to be accounting opportunities under other nakes codes as well so Contracting officers have a habit of using different nakes codes for the exact same thing that's just part of the awesomeness of government Contracting that you'll have to get used to but so if I click on this you can see here it's breaking it down for me you know so if I have information for instance and click on information related and there's a lot that's going to be under this so it's what are the type of things it's bringing up here a human tracking system satellite stuff what if I go to something more basic like construction here let me get rid of the information once so here it's showing me solicitations for construction that are again this is due in a couple weeks at the end of February and this is for let's see Daybreak room renovation HVAC control replacement emergency so a lot of different things and if I wanted to learn more I would simply click on the link and it's going to tell me a few things and let's just walk through this solicitation here it's giving me a notice ID now all of this you want to when you're capturing your leads right although this is the ban of my existence but a lot of people use spreadsheets which is fine if you're just getting started and you only have a couple but the key actually to consistently winning government contracts because there a lot you don't control here in the timelines as I've mentioned six to 18 months could be two years the way that we actually build a pipeline of weeds that can consistently bring in revenue is by building a large pipeline so most of the successful people I know that are selling to the government whether it's a company sales executive they have large pipelines of opportunities they can actually win we'll get into that in a little bit and I'll show you a tool that I use you don't have to use in fact you can't use the tool that I built because I don't sell it but you can manipulate whatever you use for um selling to the government so look this is with the VA the Veterans Affairs that's a federal agency little tip about the VA looks at service disabled veter own small businesses and veter ownown small businesses first in a lot of cases right so there are set asides that the government will look at in order to um award some contracts here this notice ID this is something you can plug into your CRM tool we talked a little bit about that the office I want to know the actual office it's in right it's telling me office 6 now you could Google this there's a few ways to find it out it's probably well it's going to be down here most likely it's telling me at least big picture that this is in uh Hampton Virginia it's giving me the Contracting Office address right which is good know you want to know where the people are because relationships guys win contracts we want to build relationships professional relationships with people that can put you on contract that doesn't mean you're going to be going out to the movies with them but that means having some type of Correspondence maybe briefing them at their office there's a few thing I've got a thousand videos on that that's an exaggeration I've got a lot I mean we've got almost 600 videos out there so I mean you can find for free a lot of information from us on how to sell to the government if you look so go check out our Channel And subscribe now here's some other things the solicitation the here's one was published originally so was updated these update too it's another reason you need to check these sam.gov opportunities often because they do often make updates sometimes they delay when the solicitations are due here look original date the offers are due March 4th updated date offers due March 10th so I just uh even though I didn't read this before we can already see that they updated at some point when these are going to be due so they gave an extra six days there's a lot of reasons why they might do that it's telling us the product service code remember we were talking about product service codes and nakes code so look at the nakes code is Plumbing Heating and Air Conditioning but the product service code is maintenance of hospitals and infirmaries right so this is much more specific than this NES code which is pretty broad it's going to give us a description tons of documents here which I don't want to read you can read them you can download them as well it's giving us not only the Contracting Office but it's giving us the primary contact that's who we're probably going to have to email this proposal to right there was one other thing in here I wanted to take a look at hvat controls Plumbing it's saying by the way when it says that the size standard 19 million the magnitude of construction is between 250,000 500,000 the size standard they are most likely referring to is not how much you're going to make from this contract but what is the size standard associated with this nakes code of a small business typically means if you're making under $19 million you're probably considered a small business 19 million a year and this is actually telling us a little bit about the construction project 250,000 to 500 that's great because that helps us price this opportunity out look at this though right 100% service disabled veter own small business whenever you see VA first thing you need to think of is this some something that you can even bid on right if you're not a veteran owned business or service disabled veteran owned business the VA is something that I immediately am looking okay because the VA unlike all the other federal agencies they don't just have like a 3% or 5% quota of contracts to fill under sdvosb which is how I'm going to refer to this from now on but they are going to look at they have special policies that allow for awarding more than that to service disabled vet own businesses especially sty so if you have sdvosb the VA is where you can really move the needle all right I showed you a little bit about how to find solicitations on sam.gov a little bit about registering now I'm going to show you what the pros do this is what you actually want to do if you're looking for opportunities on sam.gov I want to take a quick second to talk to anybody watching this that's interested in starting a government contracting business or starting a new profession in Government Contracting our gov close certification program which I'm super passionate about is a rigorous training environment not a course a rigorous training environment that is teaching you the expertise of how to sell to the US government now this is based on my background as a former government procurement officer the work I've done as an account executive and Senior account Executives selling for big companies but even more importantly everything I've learned running a very successful consulting firm and helping over 500 clients sell to the government when you graduate from this program and it will take a lot of work for you to graduate from this program you will be able to talk to any business analyze federal spending data contract data that's publicly available and build a step-by-step sales plan for that company you'll be able to execute that sales plan build a pipeline find early leads set up meetings with the government build relationships and most importantly close contracts the students that graduate our program they go on to start their own consulting firms winning high dollar Consulting clients they go on to land high-paying salaried positions as account Executives with companies that sell to the government and by the way even kids just I call them kids right but 20s somethings just out of college with no background in Government Contracting they're beating out beating out seasoned professionals the last one that won a spot for satellite company won out 50 other applicants because he was able to walk in there after going through our program after the road mapping and Analysis the only one of all the applicants that could tell that company exactly how the government bought what they sold the exact offices that bought what they sold what contract Vehicles those offices used how much they spent and how to reverse engineer sales pipeline that could actually land those contracts being able to have that expertise talking to a company for a job or a CEO for a consulting position is immense and very few people can do it I'm so proud of the people that have gone through our program and if you are considering either a job or a business and by the way some of our students are doing both as I did they're running a Consulting business and they'll have an account executive job job it's transforming their lives it's bringing true wealth to them and their families okay back to the video all right so we have seen how to find a solicitation we were looking in construction but the key to all of this is you're really too late in my opinion if the first time I'm seeing this is when an offer is due I have to assume that other companies have already been working this meaning working with a program office months before the solicitation came out so how do I become one of those companies remember nothing illicit is going on here there is an entire phase of Government Contracting called the market research phase that happens before this comes out and that as a successful company selling to the government sales executive working for a company or somebody running a Consulting business that helps other businesses sell to the government like that is where you have to live live in the market research phase how do we get there all right I can keep responses due in the next 3 months but I'm getting rid of solicitation I'll tell you what I'm going to keep Construction in there just to show you what I'm talking about here and I'm going to change notice Type To Source sought okay now how does that change things well now and look again we're at the beginning of February let me look here February 5th I had to check so of 2025 this is due for February 19th 2025 now a source of sought is much different than a solicitation the reason a lot of companies don't like to go for these is because responding to a source of sought is not going to immediately equal you winning a contract so this is what I talked about in the beginning with companies and people that want the quick win but in Government Contracting quick wins are very rare even if the government reaches out to you and wants to put you on contract that's still going to take a long time so knowing that this is the long game by looking for source of sort we are putting ourselves ahead of our competitors who aren't looking for these things so I'm going to click on this crane rental support now crane rental support you're not writing a proposal when you respond to this you are usually putting something together more like a white paper and there is a tremendous amount of creativity you can use here unlike a solicitation which is specific it'll tell you how many pages and what font often to write your proposal in you can do whatever you want here answer their questions not answer their questions your the whole point as far as I'm concerned is you're providing good information to the government office so they can help build their solicitation but you also want to make suggestions suggestions where the government could do things better suggestions that happen to align with what your company does right if you're a accountant and you have a CPA certification if you're a construction company and you have certain types of equipment which are more fuel efficient or can get the job done better you can recommend all these things they don't have to take those recommendations but they often do right because remember you're the expert at what your company does not the US government right I was the expert at putting companies on contract and managing the contracts and the funding I wasn't the cyber security expert that's why I had an engineering team and that's why I talked to companies in the market research phase which is what this is so some of the differences here there are similarities too similarities are there's a notice ID it's telling you the agency and this case it's DOD the Navy is the branch of service it's telling you the major command navac which is I believe Navy's navy facilities command I'm an Air Force guy but I'm pretty sure that's what it is it's even telling you hey it's the Atlantic division Southeast navac ciscom Southeast it's giving you these are all places you can look up and Google where they are right because you want to figure out who you're selling to that's one of the keys to Government Contracting success is understanding who buys what you sell how they make purchases now when I come down down here this says source of s it tells me when it's due and as I come down here again product service code and nakes code so nakes code usually bigger picture all other specialty trade contractors product service code more specific lease or rental equipment right that's more specific it's giving me a big description here usually what it's going to do is ask you for a list of questions that they want answered because they may be looking for instance when we're talking about certifications how does the government decide to make something a small business set aside meaning only small businesses can apply for the contract how does the government set something aside for like in the last example we saw a solicitation that was set aside by the VA for service disabled better owned small businesses well in order for the government to set it aside or set a solicitation or a contract opportunity aside for a certain type of business they need to know that there are businesses out there with that certification that could do the work right I'm not going to set aside an opportunity like this for a woman-owned small business if I don't have a handful of woman-owned small businesses that not only can do it but a probably going to submit proposals on it right so we have to know the government has to know what kind of companies can do the work now let's see here there's going to be a bunch of it's telling you first of all look this is key guys don't take the the Government Contracting is not the easy way out if you are watching this because you think this is the easy game get out of this video go do something else go work for someone business in general is not the easy game and selling to the government is 10 times harder than selling to another business or to the consumer okay so have a business then start selling to the government or look if you're interested in Government Contracting then go to my website goose.com and talk to our team because we're teaching this process so you can have the expertise of government if by the way if you go through our program you'll know more about Government Contracting than almost anyone out there most sales teams aren't trained most companies are just throwing stuff against the wall trying to see what sticks our guys are going out there getting high salary jobs working for companies they're going out there and they're starting their own Consulting businesses with multiple clients you can do a lot learning this expertise and then approaching it as a consultant or as a sales executive and then get into it from your own business later on if that's what you want to do anyway enough of a plug what we're doing what I want to find out is so it's going to give me the exact contact this is who you're reaching out to and it's telling you that look responses I'm going through everything responses are limited to five pages in length and there's probably a bunch of other questions in here that they want you to answer there's a document here source of s question there here I'm going to open that up just so you could see it all right see they gave you a nice form to fill out here so it here's some basic company information they want to know okay so look at this they want to know do you have any of these certifications that doesn't mean it's going to be set aside right but let's say you're small business and you don't have any of these other SS do you know what I would do I would recommend to the government that they don't set this aside for anything but a small business I'm recommending that the government includes me at least gives me the opportunity to make an offer here but more than that I want to set up a meeting with them tell them about what I'm doing so look relevant experience they want to know what kind of experience you have guys for everybody that is thinking about selling starting a government contracting business anybody that's been watching this middleman nonsense that is out there which is probably one of the worst ideas I've heard as far as Government Contracting and plenty of people come to us after they've been they've either paid for a course to teach them how to do something that never worked or they even worse actually won a middleman contract making no profit or barely any profit I mean you're signing yourself off for a huge pain in the ass it's not a good business model right here they're asking does your company engaged in the business of providing Crane Rental Support Services okay let's just like pause and say that you are one of these people that wants to start a government contracting business you think you're going to middleman something and you get to this does your company regularly engage in the business of providing Crane Rental Support Services to include crane operators the answer is no you don't okay because you are not the crane rental company right you're a middleman right so the answer is no it's either yes or no but you're like oh no but I've got maybe a sub or something with a teaming agreement no if so please list the types of relevant tasks or Services provided in the location of the work look you know why they're asking you this hold on I'm going to like get off the screen for a second they are asking you this because they want to ensure that they're putting somebody on contract that has done this work before I'm not putting a company on contract that doesn't know anything about cranes I'm not putting a middle I want the company that provides the crane rental services that knows everything about cranes because I don't I don't need to put somebody else on contract that doesn't know about crane rental services right that's not a good use of taxpayer money which by the way like with everything going on with the administration and wasting taxpayer money right now I don't know how much longer you think like the very few people that are having any success with middleman anything trust me that's not if anything's going away it's going to be that but look we want to know the government wants to know do you have experience doing this right so there's two takeaways here one is you can't answer this as a middleman and say you have experience you have to start talking about maybe someone you have a teaming agreement with this is how we weed out people that don't have experience right we're looking for the companies that actually have done this before sometimes this can result in a soul Source contract if there aren't any other companies but yours that can do the work but also the companies winning these are actually starting way ahead of you with the source of sought so as a Contracting officer a program manager I already know there's maybe five companies that provided that yes they have experience they've told me all of the locations the experience that they've done how long has the company been providing the services so now I've got this a nice uh basket of companies that have relevant experience talking about they're answering the subcontracting question so I have all this information by the time a solicitation comes out and then I've got five legitimate companies that offer a proposal for this and then I've got two middlemen quote quote unquote do you think I would have to be out of my mind to award this contract to anyone but the companies that actually have proved that they've done this before and yes price and some other things come down to this and you know there are some people that slip through the cracks but guys you really got to understand what you're doing here source of s is so important so if you are a company and you are selling commercially and you're going to start selling to the government you need to know that this is an important part of the process and you got to start way earlier if you're a sales executive you need to get way ahead of the solicitation for the companies you've worked for if you're a consultant just Hammer this home to any client you're working with we have got to find Opportunities before the solicitation comes out now in part two of this we are going to talk about what comes next what do you do after you find a solicitation what do you do after you find a source of sought how do we construct this to the best of our ability how do we reach out to the government office how do we set up a meeting with them how do we take these opportunities and turn them into closed contracts I'm going to show you some things that work some things you probably haven't thought about we're going to handle all of that in the next episode and also I want to check out gov close.com that's our certification program if you want to learn more if you want to put your Sal team through the training if you want to become a consultant right so if you thought hey starting a government contracting business was a good idea but now after listening to me you think maybe it's not then learning the process and then approaching it as a consultant it's actually a great idea not only do we teach the expertise of Government Contracting I show each of our students who I personally work with how to start a Consulting business we show them how to price their proposals and leads we help them with job placement and that goes to the companies watching this you can hire our certified advisers so if you go to goose.com just click on hire an advisor you can get a call set up with me we place people in companies for full-time positions there is some fractional positions available as well if you're looking for someone just to help you with your business development thanks for watching we'll see you on the next episode